Occult History

Schmidt Number: S-2336

On-line since: 15th July, 2007

Lecture 2

Stuttgart, 28th December 1910

IN
the introductory lecture yesterday our attention was drawn to the fact
that certain events in the more ancient history of mankind can be rightly
understood only when we not merely observe the forces and faculties of
the personalities themselves, but when we realise at the outset that
through the personalities
in question, as through instruments, Beings are working who allow their
deeds to stream down from higher worlds into our world. We must realise
that these Beings cannot take direct hold of the physical facts of our
existence because, on account of the present stage of their development,
they cannot incarnate in a physical Body which draws its constituents
from the physical world. If, therefore, they desire to work within our
physical world, they must make use of the physical human being —
of his deeds, but also of his intellect, his powers of understanding.
We find the influence and penetration of such Beings of the higher world
the more clearly in evidence the farther back we go in the ages of the
evolution of humanity. But it must not be imagined that this downpouring
of forces and activities from the higher worlds into the physical world
through human beings has ever ceased; it continues even into our own
time.

To the spiritual scientist
who for years now has been absorbing principles which lead his feelings
and ideal to accept the existence of higher worlds — to him a
fact such as this will certainly, from he outset, be to some extent
comprehensible; for he is accustomed always to draw the connecting threads
which link our knowledge, our thinking, our willing, with the Beings
of the higher Hierarchies. But from time to time the spiritual scientist
is also in the position of having to guard against the materialistic
conceptions which are so prevalent in the present age and make it impossible
for those who stand aloof from the development of the spiritual life
even to enter into what has to be said about the working of higher worlds
into our physical world.

Fundamentally speaking,
it is considered an antiquated attitude in our time even to speak of
the influence of abstract ideas in the events of history. Many people
to-day regard it as quite impermissible, in face of the genuinely scientific
approach, to speak of certain ideas, abstract ideas which properly speaking
can live only in the wind, taking effect in the successive epochs of
history. A last semblance, at least, of belief in the influence of abstract
ideas — although how they are to work is incomprehensible
precisely because they are abstract ideas! — was still in evidence
even in the 19th century, in Ranke's exposition of history
[see Note 10]
But even this belief in ideas as factors in history is gradually being
discarded by our progressively materialistic development, and in a certain
respect to-day it is regarded as the sign of an enlightened mind in
the domain of history to believe that all the characteristic features
of the several epochs merely represent the convergence of physically
perceptible actions, outer needs, outer interests and ideas of physical
human beings. The time is now past when spirits such as Herder, as if
through a certain inspiration, still portrayed the development of human
history in a way which enables one to perceive that it is based on the
assumption, at least, of the existence of living powers, living
super-sensible powers manifesting through the deeds and the lives of men.
[see Note 11]
Those who want to be accounted very clever to-day, will say: “Well
yes, a man such as Lessing certainly had many really intelligent ideas,
but then, at the end of his life, he wrote nonsense such as you find in
The Education of the Human Race,
where the only way in which
he could help himself out of his difficulties was by linking the strict
conformity to law shown by the flow of historical development with the
idea of reincarnation.” In the last sentences of
The Education of the Human Race,
[see Note 12]
Lessing has
actually expressed what is described by Anthroposophy on the basis of
occult facts — namely, that souls who lived in ancient epochs
and then absorbed active, living forces, carry over these forces into
their new incarnations, so that behind physical happenings there is
not an abstract onflow of ideas but an actual and real onflow of the
spirit. As I said, a clever ass will insist that in his old age Lessing
hit upon ideas as confused as that of reincarnation, and that these
ideas must he ignored. — This reminds one again of the bitterly
ironic yet brilliant note once written by Hebbel in his diary, to the
effect that a fair motif would be that a master, taking the subject
of Plato in his school, has among his pupils the reincarnated Plato,
who understands what the master is teaching so little that he has to
be severely punished!

The conception of the
historical evolution of humanity has lost much of the earlier, spiritual
insight, and Spiritual Science will really have to guard against the
onslaught of materialistic thinking which comes from all sides and regards
communications which are based on the spiritual facts as so much lunacy.
That things have come to a pretty pass is shown, for example, in the
fact that all those mighty pictures, those grand symbolical conceptions
which emanated from the old clairvoyant knowledge and are expressed
in the characters of legends and fairy-tales, have interpreters of the
very oddest kind. The most curious production in this domain is undoubtedly
Solomon Reinach's little book Orpheus, which has caused a certain
furor in many circles in France. Everything from which the ideas of
Demeter, of Orpheus, and of other mythological cycles are supposed to
have sprung, is traced back in this book to purely materialistic happenings
and it is often utterly grotesque how the historical existence of this
or that figure, standing, let us say, behind Hermes or Moses, is alleged
to have originated, and with what superficiality an attempt has been
made to explain these figures as the inventions of poetic license, of
human fantasy. According to Solomon Reinach's method it would
be easy, sixty or seventy years hence, when outer memory of him will
have faded somewhat, to prove that there never was such a man, but that
it was simply a matter of popular fantasy having transferred the old
idea of Reinecke Fuchs to Solomon Reinach. According to his method this
would certainly be possible. The absurdity of the whole book is on a
par with what is said in the Preface — that it has been written
“for the widest circles of the educated public, even for the very
young.” “For the very young” — since he emphasises
that he has avoided everything that might cause a shock to young girls
— although he has not avoided tracing back the idea of Demeter
to a pig! He promises, however, that if his book gains the influence
he hopes for, he will write a special edition for mothers, which will
include everything that must still be withheld from their daughters.
— That is the kind of thing we have come to!

One would like to remind
students of Spiritual Science particularly, that it is possible to prove
on purely external grounds that spiritual powers, spiritual forces have
worked through human beings right up to our own century — and
this quite apart from the purely occult, esoteric research with which
we shall be mainly concerned here. But in order that we may understand
how it is possible for Spiritual Science to maintain, on purely external
grounds, that super-sensible powers exercise sway in history, let me
point to the following.

Anyone who gains a little
insight into the development of modern humanity, let us say in the 14th
and 15th centuries and on until the 16th, will realise how infinitely
significant in this outer development was the intervention of a certain
personality, one in respect of whom it can be proved from completely
external evidence that spiritual, super-sensible Powers worked through
her. In order to throw a little light on the occult understanding of
history, we may ask the question: What would the development of modern
Europe have been if at the beginning of the 15th century the
Maid of Orleans
had not entered the arena of events? Anyone who thinks,
even from an entirely external point of view, of the development that
took place during this period, must say to himself: Suppose the deeds
of the
Maid of Orleans
were erased from history ... then,
according to the knowledge obtainable from purely external historical
research, one cannot but realise that without the working of higher,
super-sensible Powers through the Maid of Orleans, the whole of France,
indeed the whole of Europe in the 15th century, would have taken on
an altogether different form. Everything in the impulses of will, in
the physical brains of those times, was directed towards flooding all
Europe with a general conception of the State which would have extinguished
the folk-individualities and under this influence a very great deal
of what has developed in Europe during the last centuries through the
interplay of these folk-individualities would quite certainly have been
impossible.

Imagine the deed of the
Maid of Orleans blotted out from history, France abandoned to her fate
without this intervention, and then ask: Without this deed, what would
have become of France? And then think of the role played by France in
the whole cultural life of humanity during the centuries following!
Add to this the facts which cannot be refuted and are confirmed by actual
documents concerning the mission of the Maid of Orleans. This young
girl, certainly not highly educated even by the standards of her time,
suddenly, before she is twenty years old, feels in the autumn of 1428
that spiritual Powers of the super-sensible worlds are speaking to her.
True, she clothes these Powers in forms that are familiar to her, so
that she is seeing them through the medium of her own mental images;
but that does not do away with the reality of these Powers. Picture
to yourselves that she knows that super-sensible Powers are guiding her
will towards a definite point — I am speaking to begin with, not
of what can be told about these facts from the Akasha Chronicle, but
only of what is confirmed by documentary evidence.

We know that the Maid
of Orleans confided her vision first of all to a relative who —
one would almost say, by chance-happened to understand her; that after
many vicissitudes and difficulties she was introduced to the Court of
King Charles who, together with the whole French Army, had come to his
wit's end, as the saying goes. We know too, how after every conceivable
obstacle had been put in her way, she finally recognised and went straight
to the King, who was standing among such a crowd of people that no physical
eye could have distinguished him. It is also known that at that moment
she confided to him something— he wanted to test her by it —
of which it can be said that it was known only to him and to the super-sensible
worlds. You also know from ordinary history that it was she who, under
the unceasing impulse and urge of her intense faith — it would
be better to say, through her actual vision — and in face of
the greatest difficulties, led the armies to victory and the King to
his crowning.

Who intervened at that
time in the course of history? — None other than Beings of higher
Hierarchies! The Maid of Orleans was an outer Instrument of these Beings,
and it was they who guided the deeds of history. It is possible that
someone may say to himself: “If I had guided these deeds I would
have guided them more wisely!” — because he finds one thing
or another in the procedure of the Maid of Orleans at variance with
his own way of thinking. Adherents of Spiritual Science, however, should
not wish to correct the deeds of gods through human intellect —
a very common practice in our so-called civilisation. There have also
been people who quite in the Spirit of the present age, have wanted,
as it were, to unburden modern history of the deeds of the Maid of Orleans.
A characteristic modern work with this materialistic trend has been
written by Anatole France. One would really like to know how materialistic
thinking manages to reconcile itself with much irrefutable evidence
— I am still speaking only of actual historical documents. And
so because we are in Stuttgart and I sometimes like to take account
of local matters, I want to quote from a document to which reference
has already been made here.

Those who belong to
Stuttgart certainly know that there once lived here a man
[see Note 13]
who carried out important research on the Gospels. As spiritual scientists
we certainly need not agree with the things — some of them extremely
clever — that were brought forward by Gfrörer — that
was his name — and we may be quite sure that if he had heard what
is now being given in the domain of Spiritual Science he would have
used terms he was often wont to apply to his opponents — whom
he, with his stubborn-headedness, by no means always let off lightly.
He would have said that these Theosophists, too, are people who are
“not quite right in the head.” But this was before the time
when, as is the case to-day, historical documents can be passed over
for purely materialistic reasons if they happen to deal with inconvenient
facts and obviously point to the working of higher forces in our physical
world. And so I will again quote from a short document — a letter
published in the first half of the 19th century. I will read you just
a few paragraphs from this letter, which was quoted by Gfrörer
at that time in justification of his belief. I will read a passage characterising
the Maid of Orleans, and then ask you to think of the implications of
such a vivid description.

After the writer of this
letter has set forth what the Maid of Orleans accomplished, he continues:

“This and much
more has the Maid brought about, and with God's help she will accomplish
still greater things. The girl is of appealing beauty and manly
bearing; she speaks little and shows remarkable sagacity; when she
speaks she has a pleasing, delicately feminine voice. She eats little
and abstains from wine. She takes pleasure in fine horses and weapons
and admires well-accoutred and noble men. To be obliged to meet
and converse with large numbers of people is abhorrent to her; her
tears often overflow; she loves a happy face, endures unheard of
toil, and is so assiduous in the manipulation and bearing of weapons
that she remains uninterruptedly for six days — day and night
— in full armour. She says that the English have no right
to France, and therefore — as she says — God has sent
her to drive them out and conquer them, but only after previous
warning. For the King she shows the deepest veneration; she says
he is beloved by God, is under special protection, and will therefore
be preserved. Of the Duke of Orleans, your nephew, she says that
he will be delivered in a miraculous way, but only after a demand
for his release has been made to the English who hold him prisoner.

“With that,
revered Duke, I bring my report to a conclusion. Still more wonderful
things are happening and have happened than I can write of or describe
to you in words. While I write this, the afore mentioned Maid has
already gone to the neighbourhood of the city of Rheims in Champagne,
whither the King has hastily set off for his anointing and crowning
under God's protection. Most respected and powerful Duke,
and greatly venerated master! I commend myself to you in all humility,
while praying the Almighty to protect you and fulfil your desires.
Written at Biteromis, the 21st day of June in the year 1429.

Your humble servant
PERCEVAL
Lord of Bonlaninth. Counsellor and
Chamberlain of the King of the French
and of the Duke of Orleans, Seneschal of
Berry.”

This letter
[see Note 14]
was written by one who knew the Maid and was in close contact with the
King. It is indeed amazing when one discovers all these things on purely
occult grounds and with occult means of proof — for they are indeed
to be found in the Akasha Chronicle — and then sees how, in cases
like this, actual historical documents can also be produced. In short,
it seems almost madness to doubt what was working through the Maid of
Orleans. And when we also take into consideration the fact that through
her deeds the whole history of modern time assumed a different aspect,
this gives us the right to say that here, verified by documentary evidence,
we can see the direct intervention of the super-sensible worlds. When
the spiritual researcher goes further and seeks in his own way for the
one who was the real Inspirer of the Maid of Orleans, he finds something
very remarkable as he investigates the successive epochs of time. He
finds that the same Spirit who worked through the Maid of Orleans as
his instrument at that time had inspired — in a quite different
form, a quite different way — another personality who was a philosopher
at the Court of Charles the Bald. This was Scotus Erigena, through whose
philosophical and theological ideas in an earlier period Europe had
been so deeply influenced. And so we see that the same Powers work in
different epochs in a different way through human beings who are their
instruments; that there is continuity, an onflowing stream of happenings
in what we call history.

I showed you yesterday
how a significant myth of Babylonian-Chaldean times points to the penetration
of the spiritual worlds into men upon whom much depended for the third
Post-Atlantean period, for the whole of historical development in ancient
Chaldea, in ancient Babylonia. But we must now also observe from the
standpoint of occult science the two personalities hidden behind the
legendary names of Gilgamish and Eabani. In the Sense of occult history
we have to see in them personalities who stand at the starting-point
of the Babylonian-Chaldean epoch of culture. The impulses proceeding
from them are to be discerned again in the development of the really
spiritual culture of ancient Babylonia and Chaldea. — Now Gilgamish
was a personality who had many incarnations behind him and may therefore
be called an “old” soul within the evolution of humanity.

You know from the book
Occult Science
that during the Lemurian epoch of earth-evolution only very
few human beings had outlasted, on the earth itself, the happenings
of this evolution, that only a few remained on the earth during the
Lemurian epoch; that before the actual danger of the mummification of
everything human began, the majority of souls withdrew from the earth
to other planets, continuing their life on Mars, Saturn, Venus, Jupiter,
arid so forth. Then, from the end of the Lemurian epoch and during the
Atlantean epoch, these souls gradually came down to the earth in order
to incarnate in earthly bodies under the changed earthly conditions,
and to appear in ever new incarnations. Thus there are souls who came
down comparatively early from the planetary worlds and others who came
down late; indeed not until the later periods of Atlantean evolution.
The souls who came down early have therefore more incarnations behind
them in earth-evolution than those who came down later; hence we can
call these latter, in contrast to the former, “younger”
souls — souls who have taken less into themselves.

The individuality hidden
behind the name Gilgamish was an old soul, and a younger soul was incarnated
in Eabani, at the starting-point of the Babylonian civilisation. Indeed,
in connection with human souls being younger or older in this sense,
something very remarkable discloses itself — something that might
almost be said to cause astonishment even to the occultist. If someone
has reached the point to-day of giving a little credence to the truths
of Spiritual Science, but otherwise still clings to the prejudices and
criteria of the external world, it will seem plausible to him that modern
philosophers or scholars, for example, should be accounted among the
older souls. But, strangely enough, occult research finds just the opposite;
and for the occultist himself it is surprising to find that in Kant,
for example, there lived a young soul. Yes, the facts show that it is
so ... it cannot be gainsaid. It can also be intimated here that younger
souls — the majority at any rate — incarnate in the coloured
races, so that it is the coloured races, especially the negro race,
which mainly brings younger souls to incarnation. The characteristic
quality of that kind of thinking which comes to expression in erudition,
in the materialistic science of to-day, calls for younger souls. And
it can be shown that in the case of many a personality where one would
not in the least expect it, the preceding incarnation was in an uncivilised
race. That again is what the facts tell us! It must be kept strictly
in mind, for it is so. Naturally this does not in the least detract
from the significance or value of the opinions we have formed about
the world around us; nevertheless it must be grasped in order fully
to understand the essentials here. In this sense, in Eabani we have
to do with a young soul and in Gilgamish with an old soul in ancient
Babylonia. The whole nature of an old soul will enable it early in life
to grasp not only the essential element, the essential factor, in the
existing culture, but also that which strikes into it as a new impulse,
opening up a wide vista into the future.

There will be many, of
course, who will protest if one tries to make it plausible to them that
the Theosophists whom they are wont to look down upon are, generally
speaking, older souls than people who deliver scientific lectures. Investigation
shows, however, that this is so; and although spiritual research must
not be misused for the purpose of forcing people to change their criteria
of judgment, or of scoffing at what is after all part of the very make-up
of our civilisation, nevertheless the truth must be faced fairly and
squarely. Gilgamish, then, was a personality who, owing to his particular
condition of soul, participated in the most progressive spiritual elements
and spiritual factors of the age — in everything that threw light
far into the future and at that time could be attained only if such
a personality went through a kind of initiation. Through the imparting
of something that can be received only through a certain initiation,
Gilgamish was to be enabled to provide a kind of leaven for the Babylonian
culture. He had to experience an initiation up to a certain degree.

Let us think of this Gilgamish
at the point where he stood in the evolution of humanity before this
initiation. He was a man of the third Post-Atlantean epoch. But in this
epoch twilight had already fallen over the natural human clairvoyance,
over what men were able to achieve through forces that were innate in
them. These forces were no longer present to the degree that could enable
any great number of men to look back into their earlier incarnations.
If we were to go farther back, into the second or into the first Post-Atlantean
epoch, we should find that the majority of human beings then on the
earth could look back into their earlier incarnations, into the course
of their soul-life before their present birth. But that faculty had
been lost. In the case of Gilgamish, the Being who was to reveal himself
through him, and who could do so only by leading him presently to a
kind of initiation, kept a guiding hand upon him from the outset and
set him at the place where he came to recognise his own position in
the history of the world. As it were through super-sensible events, presented
to us in the pictures of the myth I outlined to you yesterday, a friend
was placed at the side of Gilgamish, a friend whose barbarity and uncivilised
nature are indicated by the statement that his outer form was half animal.
It is said that this friend had skins of animals on his body, which
means that he was still covered with hair like the men of primeval times,
that his soul was so young that it built for itself a body which showed
the human being still in a savage state. Thus the more advanced Gilgamish
had in Eabani a man at his side who, because of his young soul and the
bodily Organisation conditioned by it, still possessed ancient clairvoyance.
This friend was given to Gilgamish in order that he might find his own
bearings in life. With the help of this friend he was then able to achieve
certain things, such as the retrieval of that spiritual Power presented
to us in the myth in the picture of Ishtar, the Goddess of the city
of Erech. I told you how this Goddess had been stolen by the neighbouring
City and that for this reason Gilgamish and Eabani together waged war
against this city, vanquished its king and brought the Goddess back.

If we are to understand
in the true historical sense such things as are presented to us in these
old myths, we must investigate their occult background. Behind this
rape of the City Goddess there lies something similar to the rape of
Helen, who was carried off to Troy by Paris. We must realise that there
are good grounds for what is stated in my little book,
Blood is a very special Fluid.
It is pointed out there that in the peoples
of ancient times there was a kind of collective consciousness. A man
did not merely feel his personal ego within his skin, but he felt himself
as a member of the tribe, of the city-community. Just as the individual
human soul is felt to be the centralising factor for our organism as
a whole, uniting fingers, toes, hands, legs, so did man in very ancient
times feel himself a member of the group-soul. Something of the kind
still persisted in the early city-communities, even in ancient Greece.
One common spirit, a folk-egohood, a tribal egohood, lived and weaved
through the single personalities of the tribe or folk. But whatever
could come to men's consciousness from this collective egohood
had to be under the guidance of the Mysteries in the secret temples,
where the priests directed the common spiritual affairs of a city or
a tribe. And it is not a mere figure of speech, but in a certain sense
an actual reality, to say that such a temple-sanctuary served as a dwelling-place
for the city-ego, for the group-soul. There this group-soul had its
habitation, and the priests of the temple were its servants. It was
they who received the instructions of this group-soul through inspiration
— through what was known as an Oracle — and bore them out
into the world in order that one thing or another might come to pass.
For we must think of the Oracles exactly in the sense I have indicated.

Now the direction of these
temple-sanctuaries was bound up with certain secrets, and many conflicts
in ancient times arose because the temple-priests of one city were carried
off by the neighbouring city, so that in this way, together with the
priests, the most important secrets of a city came into the hands of
the neighbouring one. There you have the reality behind the picture
of the abduction of Ishtar, the city Goddess, the group-soul of Erech,
by the neighbouring city. The priests, the trustees of the temple secrets
were made prisoners, because the neighbouring city hoped in this way
to come into possession of the holy secrets and therewith of the power
of the city in question. That is the real background.

In the condition of soul
at first prevailing in him, Gilgamish could not himself be aware of
such things; he did not see their full implications. But a younger soul
could be for him as it were the clairvoyant sense which enabled him
to recapture the temple treasure for his own city. Gilgamish now realised
that in human life, especially in times of transition, there is such
a thing as is described in the legend of the blind man and the cripple:
each is helpless alone, but together they can make progress inasmuch
as the blind man carries the cripple on his shoulders and the cripple
lends the blind man his power of sight. In Gilgamish and Eabani, whose
respective gifts differed so greatly, we see the same kind of co-operation
transformed into the spiritual. In the historical facts of ancient times
we find this at every turn. And it is important to understand it, for
only then do we realise why it is that myths and sagas so often tell
of friends who have to achieve something together — friends who
are generally as unlike in their nature of soul as were Gilgamish and
Eabani. But what Gilgamish also acquired through his friend Eabani was
this: he was as it were “infected” by Eabani with a clairvoyant
power of his own, so that to a certain extent he could look back into
his own earlier incarnations. This would certainly have been beyond
his normal faculties. And now let us picture vividly how Gilgamish must
have been influenced by this vision of his past incarnations.

What was he able to experience
from the moment when it became possible for him to look back into what
his soul had lived through in earlier incarnations? At first it all
seemed alien to him. He could not penetrate fully into what he himself
had been in these earlier incarnations; he did not, as it were, recognise
himself. So it would be with any human being if he began to look back
into his previous incarnations. In most cases things would be different
from what they are in the vain imaginings which are always so much in
evidence when there is talk of some person or other being an incarnation
of this or that individual. We may well come across a person who cites
a whole series of great names in history as those of his former incarnations
... in fact numbers of people are convinced that they were never below
the rank of a queen or a princess! In these matters, which should be
treated with great earnestness, there must be no unlawful play of fancy,
no misusage.

Now one who, like Gilgamish
at that time, begins to look back on his successive incarnations, may
also now and then be veritably astonished. Gilgamish himself looked
back to incarnations when he was still involved in all kinds of conditions
determined by the sway of the group-soul. To be sure he had, in a certain
respect, as a person, worked his way out of these connections; through
Eabani he had also come to know for the first time the whole import
of what is symbolised in the myth through the figure of the city Goddess.
But when he looked back there was much in his earlier incarnations that
did not please him, that went against the grain. He found, for example,
that in these incarnations his soul had had unusual friendships, human
connection, of a kind which in his present life he would have regarded
as shameful. Thus, in face of what the City Goddess had revealed to
him indirectly, through Eabani, he began in a certain way — as
the myth indicates — to upbraid, to reproach his own soul. In
the myth it is said that he reproaches the Goddess about her lovers,
for he is jealous of them. He is looking as it were across the horizon
of his own soul and the visions are living realities before him, as
real as human beings who stand around someone in the physical world,
eliciting feelings of sympathy or antipathy towards them. In the reproaches
leveled by Gilgamish against the Goddess we perceive that he is really
speaking in terms of what is happening in his own soul. Thus,
for example, when it is said that he reproaches the Goddess about her
previous relationship with one who is called Ishullanu (Ischlanu) in
the myth, this signifies that his own friendship with a certain person
who had been his master's gardener in the preceding incarnation
was not pleasing to him.
[see Note 15]
What took place in the soul of Gilgamish and which first imparted to it
that inner content, that inner realisation, which he needed in order to
become the inaugurator of the Babylonian civilisation — all this is
shown to us in the picture of the regaining of a certain clairvoyance, of
the ascent into super-sensible worlds which, because he was an old soul,
were in a certain sense lost to him. This is shown to us in the myth.

And then Gilgamish was
to undergo a kind of initiation by being led back to that kind of vision
which his own soul had possessed during Atlantean incarnations. What
the myth presents as the journey over the sea, and the wanderings of
Gilgamish to the West, is nothing else than the inner path towards initiation
by which his soul is led upwards to spiritual heights where it can perceive
its ancient Atlantean surroundings, when, still clairvoyant, it had
gazed into the spiritual world. The myth tells that an this, his spiritual
journeying, Gilgamish was brought to the great Atlantean Being, Xisuthros,
This was a Being who belonged to certain higher Hierarchies and who
during the Atlantean time lived in the sphere of humanity but was afterwards
transported from the world of men to dwell in higher regions. Gilgamish
was to meet this personality in order that through beholding him he
might come to know the condition of souls when they are able to look
into the spiritual worlds. Thus he was to be led upwards again into
the spiritual spheres by being transported in his life of soul into
Atlantean times. And when he is bidden not to sleep for seven nights
and six days, this signifies nothing else than an exercise which was
to make the soul capable of penetrating fully into the corresponding
spiritual regions. When we are now told that he was not able to endure
the test, Isis again signifies something of great importance, namely
that Gilgamish is represented as a personality who was brought to the
very brink of Initiation — who was destined, as it were, to look
through the portal of Initiation into the mysteries of the spirit but
owing to the conditions of the times was not able to penetrate fully
into their depths. In short, this is intended to indicate that the inaugurator
of the Babylonian civilisation had remained at the portal of Initiation,
that he could not look with full clarity into the higher worlds, with
the result that he gave Babylonian culture the stamp that is a sign
of no more than a glimpse into the secrets of Initiation.

We shall now see that
the nature of external Babylonian culture was indeed such that it confirms
what has just been said. Whereas, for example, everything points to
the fact that Hermes was a personality who gazed into the very depths
of the holiest secrets of Initiation and could therefore become the
great inaugurator of ancient Egyptian culture, it must be said that
the Babylonian culture was prepared in the way I have just described:
through a leading personality who had in his soul all those qualities
which develop when penetration into the innermost essence of Initiation
has not been fully achieved. Hence historical development in ancient
Babylonia gives clear evidence of an external culture and an inner,
esoteric culture running parallel to one another. Whereas in the life
of ancient Egypt there was greater interplay between these two aspects,
in the ancient culture of Babylonia they fell apart. And within what
must be regarded as the Babylonian culture inaugurated by Gilgamish,
there was enshrined the content and substance of the most sacred, most
hidden Mysteries of the Chaldeans.

The Initiates of these
Mysteries were indeed initiated into the innermost secrets, but this
influence flowed through the external culture only as a tiny stream.
This external culture proceeded from the impulse given by Gilgamish.
Everything that has been said points to the fact that Gilgamish, as
a personality, had not actually reached the point where he could have
experienced complete Initiation. But just because at the time in which
he was working he did not give effect to his own, personal impulses,
did not impart his own personal forces to the world, he was very specially
able to let one of the spiritual Beings we place in the rank of the
Fire-Spirits, the Archangeloi, work through him. Such a Being did indeed
work through Gilgamish, and it is in a Fire-Spirit that we must see
the source of the ordering of Babylonian life and its impelling forces,
for which Gilgamish was the instrument. So we shall rightly conceive
of this Gilgamish in a picture that suggests the symbol of the ancient
centaur. Such ancient symbols correspond more closely to reality than
is generally supposed. A centaur — half man, half animal —
was always intended to represent how in the more mighty of men of old
the highest spiritual manhood and that which united the single personality
with the animal organisation in a certain sense actually fell apart.
Gilgamish gave the impression of a centaur to those who were capable
of judging what he was, and it is the same to this day.

Remarkably enough, this
picture of the centaur is cropping up again in the field of modern scientific
thought. There has recently been published a book which sets out to
base itself entirely on scientific facts, and yet goes to work with
a certain absence of prejudice, hence it does not produce such an amateurish,
senseless hotch-potch as do those who call themselves Monists. The author
makes a genuine effort to understand man, and how, as an independent
being of soul-and-spirit, he is related to the physical organism. And
then this author, who bases himself on natural science, comes out with
a remarkable picture. Quite certainly he was not thinking of the centaur
when he conceived this picture, but referring to what results from natural-scientific
ideas about the relation of the soul to the body, he says: This may
be likened to a horseman riding upon his horse. The facts of natural
science, when rightly understood, compel one to say: The soul is independent
and uses the body as its instrument, as a rider uses his horse. —
Yes, the centaur is here again; things will develop rapidly, and before
people are aware of it, spiritual-scientific ideas will take root in
our contemporaries under the compulsion of the facts of natural science
itself. Not long ago I was talking to a philosopher who sets great store
by materialistic ideas, and he said to me: “Of course the picture
of the centaur arose because the old inhabitants of Greece saw certain
tribes coming down from the North on their horses, and as it was generally
misty, they thought that horse and rider were a single form. With all
their superstition they might easily imagine this.”

That is a really ingenuous
idea — perhaps not exactly philosophical — but certainly
ingenuous! This picture of the centaur, which did not arise because
the Greeks could not distinguish the rider how his horse but because
the earlier peoples inevitably thought of the spiritual being of man
as independent of the bodily nature — this idea of the centaur
is again cropping up in our time out of the very concepts of natural
science. It must therefore be said that despite all materialistic ideas
we are coming to the point to-day when materialism itself, if only it
will take the facts as they really are, will lead by and by to what
Spiritual Science has to say from its occult sources. But if, in line
with our studies, we want to focus our occult observation upon a figure
such as Gilgamish — who has already become an object of interest
to external research — we must realise that there we have to do
with penetration by a Being of the spiritual Hierarchies. So that while
we must in truth see every human being, in respect of his spirituality,
in the picture of the centaur, in the case of one who works as Gilgamish
worked, we must recognise, in addition, that the spiritual part of the
centaur is directed by higher Powers who are sending down their forces
to further the progress of humanity. And we shall find an going farther
back into history that this is revealed even more clearly. We shall
also see how modification takes place in the course of the ages up to
our own time and how spiritual forces, when they work through human
beings, assume constantly different forms the nearer we come to the
immediate present.